


Harry Potter and the Arduous Tasks of Government Reform and Post-Traumatic Healing

by re_catalogue



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:55:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23958016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/re_catalogue/pseuds/re_catalogue
Summary: “Pansy.” Harry takes a deep breath, smiles, and sits down on his couch. “How nice to see you.”“Do you speak French?”“Good morning, it’s nice to see you, too, Harry. How are you, Harry? How was Brazil, Harry? How’s your godson, Harry?”“Yes, yes, pleasantries and all that. How wonderful you and Teddy are doing well, I’m very pleased, send me a postcard next time. Do you speak French?”
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Kudos: 14





	Harry Potter and the Arduous Tasks of Government Reform and Post-Traumatic Healing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings and author's notes at the end. Thank you for reading!

Harry Potter is flat on his back watching a tendril of smoke ooze through the night and he can’t stop laughing. The Boy Who Lived is wearing his favorite jumper: navy, thick cotton, thrifted, emblazoned white logo with its significance lost to time. The Chosen One’s hair is knotted up into a bun and he’s got a purple gemstone stud in his nose and his fingers curled around a skinny joint. He feels light. Dizzy. Somewhere above him, Hermione continues, “-- somehow _honestly_ believed -- like I fought for house elves’s rights for years but I wouldn’t be immediately accepting, like Harry snogs one bloke and --”

“Hermione,” he groans. “Again?”

Laughter -- Neville’s guffaw, Ron’s snort, Luna with her giggle. Hermione even laughs, wiping at her eyes. Harry sits up and stretches, bringing the joint to rest on his lips again, admiring his friends. They’re all scattered about his tiny backyard, the five of them smoking, Ginny and Parvati and Daphne Greengrass huddled up near the back door with a bag of crisps, Dean and Seamus and a few stray others chattering loudly to one side. 

Everything is heady and hazy and slow. Hermione is looking at him, saying something, a stray box braid slipping in front of her face, her eyes alight, dressed in a magenta Weasley sweater and khaki cargo pants. Neville has his eyes trained on the sky, hair floppy, pulling a blanket around him. Ron is leaning against Hermione, as always, carefully stomping out a joint with a canvas sneaker. Luna is wearing something lacy and pink and drippy and the smoke she exhales forms shapes around her head. The stars are beautiful, it’s been seven years since the war, and Harry is still not happy.

For now, though, he’s high enough to ignore that. He agrees to whatever Hermione’s said. He participates in the conversation, cracks jokes, makes Ron laugh so hard tears run down his face. Around 11, he orders Chinese take out for all of them, jogs down to the store with Neville, both of them acting stupid and enjoying it, returning to Grimmauld Place to shouts of gratitude. They eat and laugh and joke and shout and Harry lets himself be swept along with it.

And a little after 1, everyone’s sober enough to apparate or Floo home, and they do, taking leftovers with them, Ron ruffling his hair, Hermione kissing his cheek, Luna leaving behind a good luck charm fastened from twigs, and then Harry is alone. 

The Boy Who Lived is alone in a great big house. He’s running his hands through his hair. He’s slowing his breathing. He’s checking the wards twice, three times, locking the Floo, pacing the perimeter. And when he finally collapses in his room, peeling off his trousers to sleep in his pants and sweater, he sleeps fitfully, waking up to check the walls, the corners, the wards, to reassure himself that he’s safe, he’s safe, the war is over and he’s safe. 

*

Eun-li doesn’t know what she did to deserve this. Cosmically speaking, she’s been good today. She was not a dick to the girl she hates in her Copyright Law class; she ate vegan for lunch; she washed her dishes without being nagged about it. Thus, logically, the universe should be rewarding her. Not doing whatever this shit is. 

It’s the beginning of some sick joke. A Squib, the son of a Death Eater, and the Savior Of The Wizarding World walk into a coffee shop and the latter orders a cappuccino. 

When it happens, Eun-li is standing behind the counter, tying her apron strings behind her back, watching Tori at the register. Tori’s smile is genuine and her voice gentle above the soft music as she exchanges coins; she’s new, so Eun-li’s been supervising, making sure she’s comfortable with a steady flow of customers. Dee is absorbed in his process, one earbud popped in his right ear, holding a ceramic mug in place as he froths milk. 

This is normal. This is a regular Tuesday afternoon at Urban Brew. Eun-li is used to Tuesday afternoons at Urban Brew, is used to the regulars who have their laptops and the regulars who read their books and the regulars who scribble into notebooks, is used to the plants slinking over the windows and walls. 

She is not used to Harry. Potter. Himself. walking through the door with a backpack slung over his shoulder. His hair is long and swept up into a tiny ponytail, he’s got a purple fucking nose piercing, no one in England has seen him for years, but yeah, that’s him, lightning scar bright against his dark skin. 

He trudges to the counter, Muggle-dressed in sneakers and a long-sleeved t-shirt. Tori hits the register with the side of her palm and smiles up at him. “What can I get started for you?” she says.

Eun-li realizes her mistake. Tearing her eyes away from Harry Potter, she hisses, “Dee.”

Of course he doesn’t hear her, enamored with his goddamn latte art. He’s squinting, wisp of blonde hair dipping over his eyes, the sleeve of his jumper rucked up to reveal a swirl of his tattoos. Behind her, she hears, “It’s Harry, thanks.” and Tori’s “Of course! That’ll be… ” and the sounds of a wallet opening. 

“Dee,” she says again. “Dee.”

He holds up a finger, concentrating, turning the mug in his hands. 

“You need to go to the back,” she says. “Dee!”

He rolls his eyes. Still making the latte, finishing off the ear of a milky bear or something else frivolous and stupid and -- normally Eun-li finds his dedication endearing, but this time --

And Harry Potter is walking down to the other end of the counter, awaiting his drink --

And Dee triumphantly finishes the latte, shows her the golden foamy surface with a perfect white lion swimming across its top, smirking. She’s aware of her mouth open, eyes wide, watching the moment swim closer to disaster as he turns to set the latte on the counter alongside the receipt -- 

And Harry Potter’s mouth drops into an O and his eyebrows up and his green eyes with their recognition as he says, “Malfoy?”

And Draco drops the mug. She watches it fall, watches the red shards fly across the floor, the coffee splash onto his boots and the ankles of his jeans, and Draco’s staggering backwards, hand to the counter for support --

“Is that really you,” Harry says, leaning forward, eyebrows furrowed together, nose wrinkling.

And Draco is stumbling away, his shoulders nearly flush with the espresso machine. 

He turns to her, his eyes big and mouth trembling, blinks once, hands clinging to the edge of the counter, blinks again.

Eun-li makes her decision.

“Don’t step on the shards,” she says to Draco, and he nods, numbly.

She rushes forward, avoids the coffee on the floor, and tears off her apron. She places her hands flat on the counter and jumps over, landing besides Potter. 

Grabbing his collar -- he’s taller than her by at least a foot -- Eun-li says, “Outside. We’re going outside.”

*

Harry is fine. Like completely fine with the entire situation. It’s not like he had woken up late in the morning and thought longingly of a coffee and decided he didn’t want to bother with Diagon and then spent twenty minutes on the Internet searching for the best coffee shop and then dragged his notebook and computer with him and Apparated through several contact points and walked through the rain for ten minutes and overpaid for a cappuccino and yet had ended up face to face with his teenage nemesis and then promptly been snatched by a short girl with surprising upper body strength and dragged into a back alley where she proceeded to cross her arms and glare at him as if she is the one being robbed of a cappuccino. 

He pulls away from her and mirrors her, crossing his arms. “Nice to meet you,” he says pointedly. 

She glared. “Yes, sorry. Eun-li. Nice to meet you, Harry Potter, thank you for saving the world, I wish we were meeting under different circumstances, stay the fuck away from my coffee shop.”

Succinct. Precise. He would like her if she wasn’t defending Draco Malfoy. He’s already racing towards an explanation. Maybe it’s all a front for Death Eaters, it’s a way to poison Muggles, it’s something he should investigate, anyway, God -- “You do realize that’s a Malfoy you’ve got in there.” 

“I am fully aware of Draco’s past,” she hisses. “I don’t really give a shit about what you think you know. Stay away from him.” 

He sputters, trying not to shout. “So you know he’s a Death Eater and you’re fine with him serving Muggles coffee.”

Eun-li exhales and rolls her eyes. “Let’s start over.” she says. “Hi. My name’s Eun-li. I’m Draco’s shift manager. He’s worked here for three years. He’s also one of my roommates. If he had any ulterior motives, I think I would’ve fucking noticed.”

“You don’t know what he’s capable of,” Harry says darkly, though he’s beginning to wonder himself. Three years working as a barista in a Muggle shop? None of those words line up with Malfoy. With the boy he last saw, head bowed and hands cuffed, at his own trial, ready to be released into Narcissa’s waiting arms and back to the Manor and wealth and bigotry.

“I know more than you think.” she says. She’s beginning to shiver, dressed in a long skirt and a thin sweater, glances at the brown watch around her wrist. When she looks up again at him, her dark eyes have relaxed and she’s chewing at her lip. “I’m not going to speak for him, but he’s been through a lot. Whatever your view is, he’s changed, okay? Please don’t go dragging him through the mud for your -- your high school feud or, or post-war vendetta, whatever.”

She suddenly reminds him of Daphne Greengrass, of all the times she reminded Harry that she’d lost people in the war, too, even if they weren’t on the right side. Of all the times she reminded him that some choices were not made willingly, when she pointed out how Slytherins were shunned before and after the war, how she was always at the same war memorials he was. Daphne at his welcome-home party last night, shoulder to shoulder with Ginny and Parvati, laughing at some stupid joke. 

“I don’t have a post-war vendetta,” he mutters. “I’m just - I just want everyone to be safe. I’m just curious.”

“No offense,” she says, eying him, full-out shivering now, “but the last I checked, the war’s over. You don’t need to save anyone. Least of all Draco.” She pauses. “I have to get back to work. Wait outside and I’ll bring your drink out to you.”

Harry thinks of his notebook and laptop weighing down his bag, the vision he had of writing out tasks while sipping a hot coffee slipping away from him. “Nah, it’s okay,” he said. “I’ll go somewhere else.”

She beams. “Thank you. Really. Thank you.”

Eun-li steps away from him, awkwardly nods, and walks out of the alley. Harry leans against the wall, wrapping his arms around the top of his bag. The rain is coming down in thin spindles. A coarse thread of his hair frees itself from his ponytail and begins to flicker across his face with the wind. 

He thinks about Draco, his blonde hair longer than before, fluffier. His pale hands wrapped around the mug and the tattoo -- something Muggle, not the Mark -- sliding out from under his sleeve. The golden liquid swooping into patterns as the cup fell. His lips in their puckered ‘o.’ How he clutched the counter behind him. About Eun-li immediately throwing off her apron and getting into Harry’s face, even though she knew who he was, knew he could easily hex her, shouting at him just to protect Draco.

When he walks past the window of Urban Brew on his way to another coffee shop, he can’t help looking in. But Draco’s no longer behind the counter, and Eun-li has her head bent over the espresso machine, eyebrows knitted together. 

*

Draco is not fine. He is, however, chopping onions rather aggressively. 

It’s 6 in the evening. The rain hasn’t let up whatsoever. The flat is freezing -- he had to pull on another jumper and exchange his thin trousers for track pants and pull on green knitted socks. Despite the urge to unlock Eun-li’s door and transfigure all her textbooks into mice, it’s his day on the schedule to make dinner. Therefore he is attempting a stew and slashing all their produce to bits. 

No one else is home, so Draco had wordlessly and wandlessly commanded the knife to chop. He’s got Potions work to do before morning, will have to convince everyone to leave him alone, which will be difficult considering Eun-li is sure to be on her guard and attempt to ply him with niceties and worried eyes -- he kicks the cabinets softly. He can’t recall if he ate lunch or not. He could use a drink but he already knows there’s no alcohol in the entire flat, not after the party last week. The floor seems to waver beneath him and he closes his eyes, sucks in a breath, listens to the knife stutter on the cutting board as it waits for him to regain his composure. 

He hears the door open and the knife clatters to the counter. Draco rolls his eyes and proceeds to finish the job, hammering his heel into the blunt edge of the blade. Eun-li’s voice calls out, “I’m home!” and Draco raps his fist against the counter twice in a hello, focussing his eyes on his job, lips in a flat line as he finishes dicing the onion. 

She comes into view and slides a takeout cup of coffee across the counter. He turns away from her and scrapes the onion into the pot. 

After Eun-li had dragged the Holy Chosen Savior Who Lived into and presumably verbally throttled him, she had returned to find Draco mopping up the spilled latte, Blake having emerged from the backroom to replace him as drinkmaker extraordinaire (though Blake had nowhere near Draco’s finesse with steamed milk and truthfully had no business being around any decent latte). Eun-li had then proceeded to pull Draco to the backroom, where he sat on a leather couch, miserably gnawed at his nails, and failed to make eye contact with her for a prolonged period of time. 

So she told him to go home. He did. And now, six hours later, she was attempting to platonically seduce him with an undoubtedly lukewarm drink. 

“Draco… ” she says. “What are you mad at me for?”

He drops the cutting board to the counter. “You’re an asshole,” he signs, taking great delight in pinching his right finger in his left fist. 

Eun-li raises an eyebrow and sits down across from him. “Are you going to pretend you had it handled?”

“Fuck you,” he says easily, slamming his two hands together. “You don’t get to decide what I can or can’t do.”

“Right, like you were going to open your mouth and say ‘Oh, hullo, Harry, fancy seeing you here.’”

“Paper and pencil. They exist,” he signs. “Also, fuck you again.”

“You would’ve written out the last few years, handed it to him with his coffee, then smiled and waved? Dee, you bastard, I’m hurt. You haven’t even told me the half of it.”

“I’m leaving,” he signs desperately, biting and releasing his lip. “I can’t live here anymore. People… ” he pauses, finger spells P-O-T-T-E-R, “-- found me, what’s to stop his friends or the Ministry or old --” he taps his left forearm with a fist in their sign for Death Eaters, “-- or, really, everyone else who hates me and my family from finding me and -- hurting me?”

“You’re not leaving,” Eun-li scowls. “My family loves you, we’ll always take care of you. Didn’t Harry defend you at your trial?”

“Being a,” he flounders for a moment before coming up with the words, “character witness is different than protection. Eun-li, I can’t --”

He stops. Eun-li is looking at him with her face pursed up in concern. Draco’s eyes sting and his hands tremble in the air. He realizes he’s crying. 

He hasn’t cried in a long time. 

“Sorry,” he signs. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” she says softly.

“Sorry,” he signs again, brings his body to rest against the counter on his elbows. “I don’t know what to do.”

“I told him not to come round again.”

“That’s good.”

“I don’t think he’ll come back, Draco, and if he does, you can always go to the back room and have someone else cover for you.”

“Okay.”

Eun-li searches his face. Her eyes are lined in black pencil, irises so dark they nearly blend into the pupil. At least her blue eyeshadow phase is over, he thinks. If he had had this conversation while staring at poorly blended Mediterranean Blue, he might have actually packed his shit and left. 

“Are you okay,” she says quietly. 

Draco meets her eyes, bites his lip again, and looks back at the cutting board. Sliding a few crooked carrots beneath the knife, he shakes his head minutely. 

“Can I hug you?”

Draco looks down at his hands. There’s the white scar across his left knuckles. The blunt edge of his right middle finger where the tip of it was cut off. The cracked green polish still stuck to his thumbs. The new bruise blooming on his wrist where he’d smacked it on his desk the other day. The thin ring tattooed around his pinky. The edge of a black vine creeping out from his sleeve. Beneath his pale fingers, the carrots bright and bony like fingers. The knife in his hand. The savory smell of the food cooking behind him, the rain slicking against the window. 

He nods and Eun-li wraps her arms around his shoulders. She’s too short to do it properly -- her head burrows into his back, and her small fingers scrabble to come together in front of his chest. 

Draco looks at her arms around him, lets the weight settle, and breathes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: the devil's lettuce (wink wink)/consensual drug use, post-traumatic stress disorder/depressive tendencies, mental breakdowns/near mental breakdowns, very brief mention of eating struggles
> 
> Some notes:  
> \- First of all, please note that I do not speak BSL nor am I Deaf. I am HoH, but I'm American & don't even speak ASL, let alone BSL. That being said, I did do some research and want to make a few statements about dialogue within this fic, especially Draco's. The sentence structure of British Sign Language is very much different than the structure of spoken English. For this reason, a lot of the depictions of Draco's dialogue are not written the way they would be said in BSL. A simple example is when Draco says "You're an asshole," to Eun-li, he more likely would have signed "Asshole you" or just "Asshole." BSL sentence structure goes Timeframe-Topic-Action-Comment, so most of the lines, especially those where Draco stumbles or pauses at a word, would have been structured drastically different than they actually are when written. Please let me know if I've written something wrong or disrespectful and I'll be happy to correct myself!  
> \- If you're following the timeline, this story takes place in 2005. Because I'm assuming the Wizarding World is about 10 years behind in terms of fashion, please, please, I'm begging you, take the liberty to imagine everyone dressed in British 90's fashion rather than early 2000s low-rise jeans. I'm pleading with you to imagine Ginny in bike shorts, a thick sweater, and athletic sneakers a la Princess Diana in 1995 (https://www.harpersbazaar.com/fashion/a22074424/princess-diana-bike-shorts-kim-kardashian/). I'm further begging you to picture Harry in stained acid wash jeans and a flannel over a white t-shirt. I'm really demanding that you picture Doc Martens and raggedy high-top Converse on every single character unless told otherwise.  
> \- This is most definitely not going to actually be the first chapter of this story. This is my first draft and I'm changing many, many things about the plot. But AO3 threatened to delete me if I posted nothing, and, thus, I have burdened the world with this creation. Thank you for reading anyway!


End file.
